


Combat of the Soul

by theanimalbridegroom



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Blasphemy, Love of The Wolf, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Poem poem?, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Prose Poem, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29022576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theanimalbridegroom/pseuds/theanimalbridegroom
Summary: An exploration of the martyrdom of one Will Graham and the Devil who made him a God. Love as an amorous annihilation in 60 fragments.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	Combat of the Soul

_„We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not_  
 _what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,”_  
—Richard Siken, “Lithany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”

1.

A few moments before the fall, there’s touch.

Blood is seeping between your teeth, running down the back of throat. Sweet-bitter and metallic. There’s his simple cotton shirt scraping on your stubble beneath your good cheek. You wish that the adrenaline keeping you upright would cease for a second, just one, just enough to let your skin properly feel the warmth of his. Wishes are distant lights, seen from the outside. The brain is just trying to keep the pain at bay.

You close your eyes and lean in.

2.

He isn’t touching you.

The old game of not-touch, so old it is cliché, so old it has annotations and unspoken rules and well-worn dents, where it’s been thumbed and fiddled and put down. You don’t remember who started it, you just wish it would stop. But stopping means...  
You don't know what stopping means.

A game is better than nothing, so you keep playing.

3.

It feels like falling asleep.

4.

Sweet-bitter. Bitter-sweet.

There’s two ways this could end. There’s a million ways this could end. This is going to end in all the ways it can.

5.

Where once there was warmth, suddenly there's cold. A glacial cold, a world of pressure, a stronghold. You get a moment before you black out, as if you are given the chance to pray.

You don’t take it. The warmth in your arms is fading fast. A memory. There would be no point in praying to a memory.

The darkness doesn’t wait for anyone to remember.

6.

Mother is a foreign concept, but water has been a constant all of your life and you find yourself reluctant to leave this last comfort behind.

If you bury yourself, so be it.

7.

A boundary is a skin that begs violation.  
Boundaries have long stopped being this simple.

8.

White makes the first move.

It's the side who sets the tone for the rest of the game. A fateful overture of sorts. An axe falling, severing. Offense, defence. The pendulum swings.

Watching a player move the first piece into the void you cannot help but wonder if the player regrets the move.

Sometimes these things are practiced. Sometimes they are as impulsive as a coin toss.

9.

If you keep yourself busy enough, you can pretend you don't hear the melody.

10.

How will a love with teeth this sharp function without insulation? How will we avoid them sinking into the flesh of the other?

11.

Can the lamb lie with the wolf? Or is that just post-modern consolatory nonsense?

12.

You change the stories for him. You make them kinder. You did the math and you know the cruellest one of all can never be retold.

13.

Every time the wolf closes its eyes, it is scared the lamb will be gone by the time he opens them again. That is the fear of the wolf.

14.

Some nights, he will wake up, one hand clutching at his stomach and one hand wiping away silent tears, and the most merciful thing you can do is keep your back turned and pretend to be asleep.

15.

In the mornings you make him breakfast, fried eggs and sausages, squeeze fresh orange juice, and don't try to meet his eyes.

16.

They never told you it would be like this.

You don't say anything either. It takes two to keep a secret and you know the both of you would do anything to make sure it stays that way.

17.

He meets you anyway. Right where you are. Right where he knew you would be.

18.

It's always been cold. There's always been winter inside of you. Fireplaces and dinner parties were never enough to warm you up.

19.

The scorpion stings and breaks down in grief.

You don't expect the scorpion to regret it, that's not how it goes.

20.

  
He spits up your lies.

Unexpectedly, this bothers you. Haven’t all your lies come true by now, in one way or another? It’s hard to find new words, when all of them are laid out, laid down, spread open in the space between you and him. It’s hard to find new words when they all have been used as knives.

Try again. And you do because he asks you to.

21.

When you go to pray, you step into the house of God. You pass the threshold; you expect to meet Him there.

You go to pray and you meet your Lover.

22.

Oh martyr, how white your shroud is. All the better for the blood to bloom.

23.

All of his kills are yours. All the knives that ever entered you were his as well.

24.

Some days you will look into his eyes, one hand on his cheek, one hand rubbing expensive soap into his skin, avoiding the bandages and the hole in his stomach, and you will pity the foolish Devil for not noticing the glint of love's blade until after it pierced his gut.

25.

You know better than to pray for his absolution, but every tear you shed is for him regardless.

26.

Let it be a fairy-tale then.

Once upon a time, God wanted a Dragon dead so He sent His Lamb to make a deal with the Devil.

The Lamb and the Devil sized each other up, a hungry sight, and a terrible one indeed.

No one should be surprised by how this ends.

27.

There will be a bowl of soup, but that comes later, and you'll wish it wouldn't taste like coins in your mouth.

28.

Your suit is falling apart so you get to wear him around for a bit.

You can never return to your wife looking like this.

29.

Mornings, just before you open your eyes, are the time of day when you are hyperaware that your heart is not inside of you anymore.

30.

Once upon a time, you choose to dissolve into seafoam and break yourself on the shores of love.

31.

You put him in your mouth, and he sees the sun. The music tells us someone just died in here.

32.

There's blood on his teeth and you think 'I got you now'.

33.

To your surprise, he leans into it.

A few months later, while he is playing on the rug with one of the dogs (the small one with bad eyesight, the one that sheds a lot but is still allowed in the kitchen), you'll realise it was partially because he was the one with the back to the drop.

34.

A few moments before the fall, there's music.

35.

In the house on a cliff by the sea, a symphony of shattering glass and beasts howling breaks out into the night. A piano stays silent throughout.

36.

Behind the veil, a black river flows. Whatever it touches, it taints. All his brides drowned; you know their corpses float delicately at the bottom. The river is insatiable, it will eat anything.

You dive.

37.

It's cold outside the belly of the beast. That's what you realised while you were sailing across the ocean for weeks, in a boat half falling apart.

At night you watched your stars, his stars. The heavens are never surprised and hardly judgemental, for all they had witnessed of humanity. Their lights glinted sharp like precious teeth in the midnight water.

38.

It's a bit like tango. Back and forth, touch like breath, breath like touch.

You make yourself appear playfully irritated when he accidentally steps on your toes. His foot lingers a bit too long on yours, barely pressing down, though it wouldn’t matter as neither of you is wearing shoes. The living room is warm enough, the wooden floors gleaming in the pleasant firelight. Dinner was good.

You both know better, know these steps like you've been dancing all of your lives.

You probably have. You haven't grown bored.

He still steps on your toes.

39.

Hours, years, miles, lifetimes away from the cliff, you take his hand and it still feels like falling.

40.

It's your turn but suddenly you are so tired. A piece will eat another piece. Let it.

41.

You love him like a limb. Fully aware. Fully afraid it will betray you by hurting itself so suddenly. You brace for the pain as the likeliest outcome.

In loving him like a limb you deny him as anything else. Skin doesn't end where it's supposed to. The gap pains you, pulses. You wonder which God made this cut and when. Loose, you walk around a wound.

42.

Violence needs something to sink its teeth into. Luckily you both have the outlet of sacrifice. Off comes the linen, the silk, the Italian cashmere, all peeled off in a go. On the carved marriage bed, you sacrifice yourselves to each other.

Mercy killing. You hang it by the noose.

43.

Holes in your back, bullet wounds an inexperienced hunter leaves on a deer's hide.  
Yet the soft grass we lay down on might still be holy.

44.

Blood floods your kitchen, and God’s house too is a slaughterhouse.

45.

Sacrifices are made in the absence of God.  
Each burning eye, reflecting the beloved,  
makes two between the two of us.

So, what do we call this meat on the table?  
You simply call it dinner.

46.

Once upon a time...

There was a Devil who helped a brave heroine set her beloved free. He wrung meat and out came pouring rubies, he broke bones and up went black castles.At last, he stitched together for them a son, seamlessly, with a surgeon's precision.

The brave heroine and her wife lived well, bloody lipped and fierce as lions.

Until the day when the Devil came back calling, to collect his end of the deal.

47.

The wolf can be alone, but it can never be alone- in love. A wolf-in love puts its goodness into the lamb. It offers the lamb a gift.

48.

“I was doing just fine on my own you know!”  
You know. You were doing just fine too.

49.

The Lamb will always bolt and the Wolf will always give chase. If asked, they don't call it devotion. They aren't asked so we can draw our own conclusions.

50.

This is how to behave with the Beloved: you flee, you fight, you give in. The violence of His assault is irresistible.

51.

There once was a Devil who wrote stories. Each of them a sweeping romance - star crossed; god crossed. He never saw one through the end though, always got stuck re-writing the beginning.

52.

Wound disobedience: He cut you lose and now you refuse to heal.

53.

God won't save us because it is inelegant.

But you share a bed, both of you stinking of rotting algae and dried blood. Two seeds, bound in the same skin. Already it has come to pain. You kiss him like that, on the surgery table at the closest vet clinic you managed to break in, before you take a fistful of oxycodone and pass out.

God saves you because he is not merciful. But who pays attention to that by now?

54.

They saw you, that's how it ended. Red-blue lights spilled onto the snow, illuminating his kneeling form.  
He looked up into your eyes, as if he wasn't the one who made the first crack in the glass.

How innocent, the sinner in his Christ-like love.

How innocent, the Devil down in the snow.

55.

Every day I wake up dead, come alive by lunch, only to die again by noon. A hundred deaths between the two of us. Please I say, don't go and get yourself killed.

56.

There is one rule of the Universe, and you watch it closely. 

As a child reality bent around, broke, became unsafe. You wait for it to break again, to break for you this time.

Shattered teacups, church collapses, girls with organs stuck divining their deaths. Reminders of entropy. Proof you collect while you eat time, bit by bit.

A teacup flying back togheter is actually not impossible, just cruelly improbable.

Meeting him is like that. Improbable. And yet it happens. Real hope is a stranger you start passing by, out in the streets, in your office.

Next time you drop the cup, you don't realise the outcome would surprise you until you see the pieces shattered on the floor.

You don't remember letting hope inside your house. Betrayal feels like fragile porcelain. The ground still unforgiving.

What if this was the only time it should have gone different - and you were the one to break it?

57.

Your God cannot be merciful. Your God is the God of love, perhaps the cruellest of all.His burning eye can scorch you; his gaze can eat you up. You will be impaled by his arrow, there is nothing at all you can do. Bliss anticipates the amorous parting of skin.

58.

Breathing matches up after a night spent impossibly tangled togheter, under the same sheet, sharing sweat and skin, saliva and semen.

Morning melodies of _inhale exhale_

_inhale exhale_

It aches, the surprise of how much pleasure this simple observation beings. How beautiful to count out the beats, the rythm. To compose without ever having gone to battle.

(It is not the first or last surprise of its kind, but it remains a personal favourite until the end.)

59.

You emerge from the watery womb baptised as one. A two-headed creature, struggling to be born. 

60.

The martyrdom of the deified lover for the Devil.

A luminous wedding - grip the Beast and hold him to you. You resemble each other, and speak a new tongue. The lambs cry out, cry tears of blood, the sun and the moon forced to witness this unholy communion.  
The Devil renounces its nature and starts praying.

Spring comes the next day.

**Author's Note:**

> is notes app poetry anything?
> 
> thank you for reading x


End file.
